Good Morning POU! This week we take a look at inventions and art stolen from black folks and given credit to white folks.
African art experts have long acknowledged that, of all the European masters, Pablo Picasso’s life’s work straddled the line between influenced by and outright theft. Art historians and researchers called it “cultural appropriation,” while Africans called it theft. Picasso said: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”
In 2006, 33 years after his death, the first significant exhibition of Pablo Picasso’s work in South Africa provoked a furious row after a senior government official accused him of stealing the work of African artists to boost his “flagging talent”. The Picasso and Africa exhibition at a Johannesburg gallery contained 84 original works by Picasso and 29 African sculptures similar to those in the artist’s collection.
It was described as an “innovative dialogue between Picasso’s work and his African inspiration”. But a spokesman for the South African Department of Arts and Culture accused organizers of deliberately downplaying the debt Picasso owed to African artists.
In a letter to a newspaper, Sandile Memela, the department’s head of communications, said: “Today the truth is on display that Picasso would not have been the renowned creative genius he was if he did not steal and re-adapt the work of ‘anonymous (African) artists’.”
Although Picasso never visited Africa, his interest in its art is well documented, from his discovery of African masks at the Musee d’Ethnographie du Trocadero in Paris in June 1907. He became an avid collector of “art negre”, as it was known.
It is unquestionable that there was a period in Picasso’s career where the famed artist was simply painting African artifacts. Whether Picasso stole African art or was inspired by it is up for debate, so some might not consider his work to be cultural theft. What is not up for debate is one of Picasso’s most famous quotes: “L’art negre? Connais pas.”
The sentence roughly translates as: “African art? Never heard of it.”